Room With A View

Our Towns

New Britain & Neighbors

January 13, 2003

New Britain Museum of American Art's latest exhibit, 150 photographs from the private collection of Lillian Farber, encompasses the birth and development of the art form, as well as some of its greatest artists. It's an impressive show.

The exhibit is named ``150 Years of Photography: A Woman's Choice.'' Ms. Farber is an 82-year-old Vermont resident who began collecting some 40 years ago and became a photographer in her own right. She collected what she liked, regardless of the artist's stature or the pedigree of the print. But her eye and instincts guided her toward artists whose names are now recognizable to even casual fans of the form: Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston.

Subjects range from the cerebral to the sensual; there are natural and urban scenes, portraits, nudes and abstracts. Some photographs are in color, but the vast majority are in black and white. This exhibit is a pure celebration of light, form and content.

A photograph by Mr. Adams shows an ancient, windswept tree wrapped around a boulder, its thick, sinewy trunk and long branches frozen in fluid form. A 1910 print by Edward Curtis chronicles a solitary American Indian with a bundle of wood on her back; another is an undated portrait of an Indian chief in full regalia peering off-camera with an expression that's brooding and pained.

Mr. Weston's ``Artichoke Halved'' elevates the delicate symmetry of the vegetable's layered and feathery leaves. In Dorothea Lange's ``Funeral Cortege,'' the face of a mourning woman is framed by the oval window and S-shaped ornament of a hearse. Alan MacWeeney's ``Irish Wedding Scene'' captures the newlyweds in a pub, the groom with slicked-back hair drinks demurely beside his bride whose glassy gaze is set off by a lopsided veil.